Crisis of the Real; Writings on Photography Since 1974

by Andy Grundberg

• ISBN13: 9780893818555
• ISBN10: 0893818550
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-06-30
• Publisher: Aperture

Summary

Agree with them or not, Andy Grundberg's provocative critical opinions invariably make one think hard about the art of photography. Gathered together in the rigorous form of a book, his reflections take on a new perspective and provide a rare opportunity to relive--and reconsider--recent history: a decade and a half of such intensity that the shape of photography changed forever. --Jim Hughes, author of W. Eugene Smith: Shadow & Substance

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword to the Second Edition
Introduction
The Crisis of the Real
Re: Mastering Modernism
Alfred Stieglitz and the Contradictions of Modernism	p. 20
Edward Weston's Late Landscapes	p. 24
Ansel Adams: The Politics of Natural Space	p. 31
Minor White: The Fall from Grace of a Spiritual Guru	p. 37
The Radical Failure of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy	p. 42
Robert Frank's Existential Refrain	p. 46
In Search of America
The Machine and the Garden: Photography, Technology, and the End of Innocent Space	p. 50
Walker Evans, Connoisseur of the Commonplace	p. 66
Helen Levitt's Realist Theater	p. 71
The Final "Facts" of Garry Winogrand	p. 75
Lee Friedlander's Portraits	p. 79
Robert Adams's Pathetic Frontier	p. 83
Joel Sternfeld: The Itinerant Vision	p. 87
Richard Avedon's Portraits: Inverted Fashion, Fashionable Mud	p. 92
Nan Goldin's Grim "Ballad"	p. 95
A New Kind of Art: Camera Culture in the 1980s
Introduction	p. 100
Photographic Culture in a Drawn World	p. 101
Andy Warhol: Presentation Without Representation	p. 106
Chuck Close's Hyperbolic Verisimilitude	p. 110
Lucas Samaras's Photographs: Sliced, Stabbed, and Cubed Polaroids	p. 114
Cindy Sherman: A Playful and Political Postmodernist	p. 118
Cindy Sherman, Continued: Grimm, but Still Playful	p. 122
Laurie Simmons: Water Buoyed	p. 125
Barbara Kruger: Photomontage with Difference	p. 128
Richard Prince, Rephotographer	p. 132
Robert Cumming, Conflationist	p. 136
Jan Groover: Consciousness as Content	p. 140
The Photograph as Art Object	p. 144
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Subject Is Style	p. 148
Now Starring The Starn Twins	p. 153
The Representation of Abstraction/The Abstraction of Representation	p. 158
Documentary Dilemmas
Introduction	p. 166
What Kind of Art Is It? Connoisseurs Versus Contextualists	p. 167
Decoding National Geographic	p. 172
Oliver North, Fawn Hall, and the View of Life from Life	p. 176
The Foreign and the Fabulous	p. 180
The "New Photojournalism" and the Old	p. 184
Magnum's Postwar Paradox	p. 191
Subject and Style: Prospects for a New Documentary	p. 196
Portraits, Real and Recycled	p. 200
Nicholas Nixon's People, With AIDS	p. 205
Displaced Sympathies: A Reading of Bill Burke's Portraits	p. 210
Photography at the End of the Millennium
Photography in Its 150th Year	p. 216
Photography in the Age of Electronic Simulation	p. 222
Looking at Television	p. 231
Photographic Memory and the News in "Real Time"	p. 236
Art Under Attack: Who Dares Say That It's No Good?	p. 241
Points of Entry: Tracing Cultures	p. 245
Photography's Dark Side: The Work of Sophie Calle	p. 250
Sweet Illusion: Vik Muniz's Sigmund	p. 254
J. John Priola: The Photograph as Index	p. 259
Photography Beside Itself	p. 263
Notes	p. 274
Text Credits	p. 279
Picture Credits	p. 280
Bibliography	p. 281
Index	p. 283
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